Organized Hypocrisy and the Logic of Coloniality. Explaining the EU's Divergent Response to Grave Violations of International Law in Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine

Abstract

‘Organized hypocrisy’ has been mainly explained in IR by the logic of consequentiality operating against the logic of appropriateness. The literature has largely ignored the role of a third logic, the logic of coloniality, which highlights that organized hypocrisy appears persistently in international relations due to omissions in the field of knowledge: It features a double absence of the ‘other’ on their own normative terms and as a rights-bearing subject. Pursuing a comparative analysis of EU policies to ensure accountability in the face of grave violations of international law in Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine, this research finds patterned discrepancies, particularly towards Palestine which are explained by imaginations in official EU discourse where Russia, Ukraine and Israel figure in a Eurocentric temporal–spatial relation to Europe, while Palestine is dispossessed of its history, not set into any relationship to Europe and figures as a partially rights-less subject in official EU discourse.